The Also-Rans

By BRUCE HANDY

Published: October 17, 2004

LOOKING FORWARD TO IT
Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the American Electoral Process.
By Stephen Elliott.

Illustrated. 306 pp. Picador. Paper, $14.

THIS is a mess of a book, and probably an unnecessary one, and yet I enjoyed almost every page. Is that a critical flip-flop? No doubt. But given the subject -- the 2004 presidential campaign -- an ambiguous or cognitively dissonant reaction is surely appropriate.

The bad news first: Do you want to read a book about the election? Aren't we already drowning in newspaper and newsmagazine articles, cable show debates and blog entries on this sad topic? Do you really care to revisit the days when, according to probability theory, someone somewhere was passionate about Joe Lieberman's candidacy? Still curious about Howard Dean's stump speech or the differences between Dick Gephardt's and Dennis Kucinich's health care plans? Wasn't it all dispiriting enough in real time?

Are you even interested in a review on the subject? (Feel free to turn the page; maybe there's an update on Jenna Jameson's book.)

O.K., now that only you and E. J. Dionne Jr. are still reading, I'll get on with it. Elliott is a San Francisco-based novelist and journalist, as well as a poker columnist for McSweeney's. Here he has produced an idiosyncratic, ramshackle account of the campaign in the guise of a reporter's diary that proves frustratingly shapeless. One obvious problem, as sticklers will point out: the election is still not over. In olden days, Theodore White, who invented the modern campaign narrative, would bring forth quadrennial volumes that climaxed with Mosaic surety when the American people spoketh on the first Tuesday in November. Elliott begins his own tale in July 2003, with Dean stumping across Iowa in the candidate's pre-presumptive nominee phase, and then brings things to an abrupt halt this past July at the Democratic National Convention. The book's genesis was a report on the Dean campaign Elliott wrote last year for the literary magazine The Believer, and one guesses that ''Looking Forward to It'' was intended to be an examination of the Dean phenomenon, which, if Dean had actually won the nomination, would have lent inherent cohesiveness and relevance; readers in this alternative universe might still be fascinated by meetups and Zephyr Teachout, Dean's liaison to the blogosphere. But oh, well. Elliott, like Dean himself, picks up the pieces as best he can.

Don't expect much in the way of nuts-and-bolts analysis. If this somewhat grungy account has a model, it's probably ''Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72'' by Hunter S. Thompson, the anti-Teddy White. Naughty goings-on, though, are relatively mild: a few passing references to drugs, a couple of hangovers, an episode of vomiting outside a Holiday Inn. In one potentially frightening encounter, Representative Kucinich offers to share a home-cooked vegan meal with Elliott. Fortunately, the food proves tasty and Kucinich, we learn to our surprise, has an almost motherly presence. A sweet scene, believe it or not.

And here, then, is the good news: Elliott is terrific and very funny writer, a keen observer with a gift for epigrams (George Bush ''has everything going for him except his record'') and a knack for blindsiding you with his sharpest insights the way a skilled horror movie director orchestrates scares. You read him for the pleasures of his company (and despite his fondness for footnotes and his many digressions about his bossy, withholding girlfriend). Take this observation of Dean:

''The governor loves sweets. When he sees a table piled with candy his eyes light up and he presses his fingers together. I will see this time and again through 10 days on the campaign trail. . . . His sweet tooth adds to his childlike quality, supported by his unelectable innocence, his smooth skin and boyish good looks, and makes me think of a bunny about to be eaten by wolves. Which is not to say I won't vote for him. I will, by absentee ballot, foreshadowing his doom.''

I'm not sure what that ultimately reveals about Dean but it made me laugh. And as for the whiff of self-loathing in the conclusion, who among us (us liberals, that is) hasn't felt possessed of a reverse Midas touch in the voting booth? Elliott is himself a reformed Nader campaign worker now panting for a Democratic victory no matter who the candidate; that desperation lends ''Looking Forward to It'' (ironic title, I think) an undercurrent of bittersweet regret more common to Edith Wharton novels than campaign books. As he notes of the Democrats' ultimate nominee: ''Essentially, John Kerry bends the truth to accommodate whichever constituency is in the room. And yet I would do anything to help this man become president, which is personally sad as it symbolizes the end of my idealistic youth.''

Not that the author had all that many illusions to lose. Back when the Democrats were still sniping at each other in public debates (rather than in off-the-record comments about the Kerry campaign), Elliott was casting an early jaded eye on the prize:

''Of course, in terms of negative campaigns, these guys are rank amateurs and putting them in a face-off with the Bush administration would be the equivalent of entering a gunfight with a butter knife. . . . Maybe after March we'll see three months of quiet while the nominee huddles with his advisers, figuring out how to grab the 'crucial center,' and everything will seem O.K. as spring seeps into summer. Until one gray August morning when the crows fly toward the Gal?gos and Howard Dean's body appears impaled upon an oil well south of Houston. A warning to all who would enter here.''

Those lines were ostensibly written last December, but sub Kerry's body for Dean's, and a rotting Swift boat for the oil well, and you have a pretty good first draft of history. Still, despair and doom are easy subjects. I'd like to see this talented writer saddled with having to write about winning -- for oh so many reasons.